by Danielle Ellis

“Motherhood Matters,” says Jane Clayson Johnson. “I really feel like this is the message I was born to give.”

It’s a message that has been hard won.

As a college student, Jane Clayson laid out her life’s plan on paper. It included finding a great husband to marry just after her BYU graduation, then a happy life at home with her eternal companion and a brood of five children. But despite her faith, prayers and righteous action, her life took turn after turn that seemed to be leading her farther away from her goal instead of closer to it.


A job at KSL, a Salt Lake television station, led to a career in television reporting, which eventually led her to be an anchor of the CBS Early Show. At the top of the broadcasting world, she was offered a lucrative, four-year news contract. Twelve hours previously, she was offered the proposal she really wanted: a marriage proposal from the right man.

After much prayer and soul searching, Jane chose to walk away from money, prestige and life in the fast lane, trading it in for the home and family she had prayed for and anticipated for so many years.

Not long after her daughter Ella was born, Jane and her husband attended a dinner meeting with many other couples. The men introduced themselves, relating their titles and jobs. The women, bright, accomplished, well-spoken, stood in turn and said something along the lines of, “I’m just a mom.”

“I’m just raising our six children.”

“I don’t have much to offer here, I’m just a mother.”

“The new mother in me said, ‘what have I done’?” Jane relates. “But the journalist in me said, “there’s a story here.” Here I was, a new mother, which was something I had waited for so long. I wanted to shout from the housetops, ‘I AM A MOTHER!’ And these women acted like that meant nothing.”

“The more I looked, I saw it everywhere.” Jane says. “Motherhood gets a lot of lip service, but it is not revered. Society measures success in terms that are not complete. If we can’t measure it, we don’t value it. And with many aspects of motherhood, we don’t see results for years. But just because something is intangible, like the love and direction a good mother provides, doesn’t mean it’s any less important.”

So Jane has written a new book, due out next month from Deseret Book, called I Am a Mother. “This is me putting a stake in the ground, saying that we need to value motherhood more. The nurturing, caring and connecting that mothers do for their children is like the mortar in a brick wall. Without it, the wall crumbles. We’re seeing it in our society everywhere,” Jane notes.

“What are we teaching our daughters when we devalue motherhood?” she asks. “We have to change the notion that motherhood is a job of lesser importance. We need to teach our young women never to be afraid to aspire to be a mother.”

What I want to know, from all her experience from television news to mopping spilled milk off the floor, is the lesson women should learn? “There are seasons in life,” Jane explains.
“We don’t sing all the verses of our song at the same time. We sing them one at a time, for a reason. Don’t ever let anyone deny you the blessings and joy of one season because they think you should be in—or stay in—another season.”

Jane wrote this book to the women of the Church to help them really feel the importance of their work as mothers. “So many women wonder if what they’re doing is really important,” she says. “As a neonatologist said to me while I looked at my son William in his isolette, ‘even though it doesn’t feel as though you’re making a difference… you are’.”
She continues, “all of mothering is like that. Even when our children cannot or will not express it, we are making a difference.”

Jane Clayson Johnson’s book, I Am a Mother, is a must read. Buy copies for all the women you know. Read it in your book clubs, share it with your friends.

I am not one to mark up my books, but I underlined most of every page in the book. This message is so important and we don’t hear it enough. Even as women of the church, who know who we are, who our children are, and our vital place in the world, we still fall victim to the lie that motherhood is not enough to occupy our time. Jane debunks that myth with power and clarity.

Take it from Jane: motherhood matters. She’s “had it all,” and willingly walked away in order to be a wife and a mother. And, as she says, “it feels good in my soul.”

Jane Clayson Johnson will be speaking on motherhood in Las Vegas on Friday, April 27th, 2007 as part of the American Mothers Inc. National Convention. For more information or to purchase a ticket ($20 to hear all speakers on Thursday & Friday), visit www.americanmothersnv.org.